The Stories of Alice Adams

by Alice Adams

  Very seriously he asked, “Well, could we at least go for a walk or something before I go? I could show you the beach.” He gave a small laugh, indicating that the beach was really nothing much to see, and then he said, “Dylan, I’ve wanted so much to see you, I care so much for you—but here, there would have been … implications … you know …”

  She didn’t know; she refused to understand what he meant, unless he was confirming her old suspicion of snobbery: his not wanting to be seen with a waitress. She frowned slightly, and said, “Of course,” and thought that she would not, after all, see him again. So much for Whitney Iverson.

  But the next afternoon, during her break, in the brilliant September weather the library looked to her unbearably dingy, and all those magazines were so old. She stepped outside through the door at the end of the porch, and there was Mr. Iverson, just coming out through another door.

  He smiled widely, said, “Perfect! We can just make it before the tide.”

  Wanting to say that she hadn’t meant to go for a walk with him—she was just getting some air, and her shoes were wrong, canvas sandals—Dylan said neither of those things, but followed along, across the yellowing grass, toward the bluff.

  He led her to a place that she hadn’t known was there, a dip in the headland, from which the beach was only a few yards down, by a not steep, narrow path. Whitney went ahead, first turning back to reach for her hand, which she gave him. Making her way just behind, Dylan was more aware of his touch, of their firmly joined warm hands, than of anything else in the day: the sunlight, the sea, her poorly shod feet.

  But as they reached the narrow strip of land, instead of turning to embrace her, although he still held her hand, Whitney cried out, “See? Isn’t it fantastic?”

  A small wave hit Dylan’s left foot, soaking the fabric of her sandal. Unkissed, she stared at the back of his shirt collar, which was more frayed even than his usual shirts, below his slightly too long red-blond hair.

  Then he turned to her; he picked up her other hand from her side, gazing intently down into her face. But it was somehow too late. Something within her had turned against him, whether from her wet foot or his worn-out collar, or sheer faulty timing, so that when he said, “You’re so lovely, you make me shy,” instead of being moved, as she might have been, Dylan thought he sounded silly (a grown man, shy?) and she stepped back a little, away from him.

  He could still have kissed her, easily (she later thought), but he did not. Instead, he reached into one of the pockets of his jeans, fishing about, as he said, “… for something I wanted you to have.”

  Had he brought her a present, some small valuable keepsake? Prepared to relent, Dylan then saw that he had not; what he was handing her was a cardboard square, a card, on which were printed his name and telephone number. He said, “I just got these. My mother sent them. She’s big on engraving.” He grimaced as Dylan thought, Oh, your mother really is an Iverson. “The number’s my new bachelor pad,” he told her. “It’s unlisted. Look, I really wish you’d call me. Any time. Collect. I’ll be there.” He looked away from her, for a moment out to sea, then down to the sand, where for the first time he seemed to notice her wet foot. “Oh Lord!” he exclaimed. “Will you have to change? I could run you home.…”

  Not liking the fuss, and not at all liking the attention paid to those particular shoes (cheap, flimsy), somewhat coldly Dylan said no; the guests had thinned out and she was going home anyway as soon as the tables had been set up.

  “Then I won’t see you?”

  She gave him her widest, most falsely shining smile, and turned and started up the path ahead of him. At the top she smiled again, and was about to turn away when Whitney grasped her wrist and said, with a startling, unfamiliar scowl, “Call me, you hear? I don’t want to lose you.”

  What Dylan had said about being able to leave after setting up the tables was true; she had been told that she could then go home, which she did. The only problem, of course, was that she would earn less money; it could be a very lean, cold winter. Thinking about money, and, less clearly, about Whitney Iverson, Dylan was not quite ready for the wild-eyed Flower, who greeted her at the door: “We’re celebrating. Congratulate me! I’ve dumped Zach.”

  But Dylan had heard this before, and she knew the shape of the evening that her mother’s announcement presaged: strong triumphant statements along with a festive dinner, more and more wine, then tears. Sinkingly she listened as her mother described that afternoon’s visit from Zach, how terrible he was and how firm she, Flower, had been, how final. “And we’re celebrating with a really great fish soup,” finished Flower, leading Dylan into the kitchen.

  The evening did go more or less as Dylan had feared and imagined that it would. Ladling out the rich fish soup, Flower told Dylan how just plain fed up she was with men, and she repeated a line that she had recently heard and liked: “A woman without a man is like a mushroom without a bicycle.”

  Dylan did not find this as terrifically funny as Flower did, but she dutifully laughed.

  A little later, sopping French bread into the liquid, Flower said, “But maybe it’s just the guys I pick? I really seem to have some kind of instinct.”

  Flower had said that before, and Dylan always, if silently, agreed with her: it was too obvious to repeat. And then, maybe there really weren’t any nice men around anymore, at her mother’s age? Maybe they all got mean and terrible, the way a lot of women got fat? Dylan thought then of Whitney Iverson, who was only about ten years younger than Flower was; would he, too, eventually become impossible, cruel and unfaithful?

  In a way that would have seemed alarmingly telepathic if Dylan had not been used to having her thoughts read by her mother, Flower asked, “What ever happened to your new friend, Mr. Iverson? Was he really one of them?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so,” Dylan muttered, wishing that she had never mentioned Whitney to her mother.

  Over salad, Flower announced that she was going on a diet. “Tomorrow. First thing. Don’t worry, I’ll still have the stuff you like around for you, but from now on no more carbohydrates for me.”

  At least, this time, she didn’t cry.

  At some hour in the middle of the night, or early morning, Dylan woke up—a thing she rarely did. Her ears and her mind were full of the distant sound of the sea, and she could see it as it had been in the afternoon, vastly glittering, when she had been preoccupied with her wet shoe, with Whitney’s not kissing her. And she felt a sudden closeness to him; suddenly she understood what he had not quite said. By “implications” he had meant that the time and place were wrong for them. He was shy and just then not especially happy, what with his divorce and all, but he truly cared about her. If he had felt less he probably would have kissed her, in the careless, meaningless way of a man on vacation kissing a pretty waitress and then going back to his own real life. Whitney was that rarity her mother despaired of finding: a truly nice man. On her way back to sleep Dylan imagined calling him. She could go up to see him on the bus, or he could come down, and they could go out together, nothing to do with the Lodge. Could talk, be alone.

  However, Dylan woke up the next morning in quite another mood. She felt wonderful, her own person, needing no one, certainly not a man who had not bothered, really, to claim her. Looking in the mirror, she saw herself as more than pretty, as almost beautiful; it was one of her very good days.

  Flower, too, at breakfast seemed cheerful, not hung over. Maybe there was something in the air? Passing buttered English muffins to Dylan, Flower took none, although she loved them. “Tomato juice and eggs and black coffee, from here on in,” she said. She did not take any pills.

  Later, walking toward the Lodge, Dylan felt lighthearted, energetic. And how beautiful everything was! (Whitney Iverson had been right.) The sloping meadows, the pale clear sky, the chalky cliffs, the diamond-shining sea were all marvelous. She had a strong presentiment of luck; some good fortune would come to her at last.

  At the soun
d of a car behind her she moved out of the way, turning then to look. She had had for a moment the crazy thought that it could be Whitney coming back for her, but of course it was not. It was a new gray Porsche, going slowly, looking for something. Walking a little faster, Dylan began to adjust her smile.

  An Unscheduled Stop

  Suddenly, on a routine flight between Atlanta and Washington, D.C., a young woman who has been staring intently out of her window bursts into violent tears. No turbulence can have upset her—the air is clear and blue and calm—but in an instant her eyes clench shut, her hands fly up to cover her face and her shoulders convulse in spasms.

  She is seated near the front of the plane and the seat next to hers has not been taken. No one is aware of this outburst but the two men across the aisle from her. Because she is good-looking, in a dark, rather stylish way, these men have been observing her since she got on the plane with them in Atlanta; they like the somewhat old-fashioned smooth way her hair is knotted, although, good old Southern boys at heart, they are not so sure about the look on her face, what they could see of it, before she began to cry: wide-eyed and serious, she hardly smiled. One of those women too smart for their own good, they think.

  The attention of the men has in fact been divided between the young woman and the landscape below, at which they, like her, have been intently peering: pinewoods, mostly; some exposed red clay, along winding white highways; a brown river; red fall leaves. Just before the woman began to cry, one of the men observed to the other, “Say, aren’t we passing over Hilton right about now?”

  “Sure looks like it. Yep, I bet you’re right.”

  At that moment the woman’s tears begin, and after a startled minute or two they start to whisper. “Say, whatever’s eating her, do you reckon?” one of them asks.

  “Haven’t got the foggiest notion; she sure don’t look drunk. Maybe some kind of a drug she took.”

  • • •

  The young woman, Claire Williston, who is not on drugs, or drunk, has been deeply mortified by those tears, which came on her like a fit, a seizure. Generally she is a disciplined person; she behaves well, even under emotional stress. She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, and rarely cries alone. Maudlin, she is censoriously thinking, and, How could I have done this to myself? How could I take a flight that would go right over Hilton?

  Vague about the specifics of geography, she had simply not realized what any map could have told her: flying from Atlanta to Washington of course you go right over Hilton, the small mid-Southern town where Claire was born and lived for the years until she went away to school up North. To which, except for one fatal summer and her father’s funeral, she has not been back for years, and where, as she sees it, she cannot ever now go back. But here she is, directly overhead.

  At last, gaining some control over the tears, she continues silently to castigate herself: for not having thought through the implications, geographic and otherwise, of flying all over the South except to Hilton. It is precisely the sort of “unconscious” mistake that people who pride themselves on rationality, on control, are most prone to make, she tells herself; it is how they do themselves in, finally.

  In a professional way her own life is indeed rational, is even a moderate success. Based in San Francisco, she is the West Coast editor of a national magazine; she likes the work, and is paid fairly well. (A less successful side of her life, containing the unconscious mistakes of which she accuses herself, has to do with intemperate love affairs, occasional poor judgment as to friends. Flying right over the place you don’t want to see or think about.) This is the last leg of a fact-finding trip in which she has thought in an abstract way about “the South,” or “the new South,” and has not thought about Hilton, or her on the whole painful upbringing there, or the searing love affair which took place on that last summer visit. Now, as a treat, she is on her way to see Susan, an old friend in Washington; she has filled a notebook with observations for the article she will write, but she has reserved some lighter conversational notes for Susan: her fantasy that all the food in New Orleans comes from a single subterranean kitchen with a gigantic black vat of béchamel; her dislike of the self-conscious, daily-manicured prettiness of Charleston; her encounter with the awful loudmouthed racist (still) cabdriver in Atlanta: “On Fridays, once they’s had they lunch, they’s no holding them till midnight, with they singing and they dancing and they razor fights.” It was Susan who occupied her thoughts, until the land below began to look so overwhelmingly familiar and she heard the man across from her: “Say, aren’t we passing over Hilton?”

  At this altitude actual landmarks are impossible to recognize, but as she continues to look down, Claire feels the most powerful pull toward that land, as if there were some special gravity into whose range she has flown. And then a remarkable event occurs; over the loudspeaker comes this announcement: “Well, folks, we’re going to be making a little unscheduled stopover right about now. Be landing down at Raleigh-Durham for a little adjustment in the oil-filter system. Won’t take no more’n a minute.”

  Dear God, I do not deserve this, Claire thinks, and at the same time, crazily, she wonders if the plane has been compelled by the same pull that she felt, like an event in science fiction. Dabbing at her face, making a few cosmetic repairs (at which the men across from her sigh with relief: when a woman can tend to her face, she’s pretty much all right, they think), she watches as the descending plane approaches the familiar pine-lined, long gray grass field. It bumps down; a few passengers applaud. The plane moves toward the bright beige terminal building.

  Passengers get up and move along the aisle, murmuring to each other that they might as well get some air, maybe coffee; the men across from Claire, with a short glance at her, go out with new just-unwrapped cigars in their hands. She remains fixed in her seat; she watches as almost everyone else leaves, and then she turns to the window again. No longer crying, she has just realized that she is deeply afraid to go into the terminal; she might see someone she knows, or once knew. Maybe even Spencer Goddard, that summer’s fatal lover, still living in nearby Hilton, presumably with his wife.

  She looks toward the pinewoods, the lacing of bright fall leaves, and she thinks of something else that she will say to Susan, describing this last leg of her trip, her South revisited: “Seeing those woods made me actually burst into tears,” she will say. “But you know how I always loved the woods down there. When I was a kid there I spent all my time outdoors.”

  Or maybe she won’t tell anyone, ever, about crying in that awful way, at the sight of familiar woods.

  The great thing about the woods, from a child’s point of view, was that parents almost never came along; the woods were quite safe then, and there was a lot to do: you could dam up streams or build tepees, wade in the creek or swing on the heavy grapevines, or just run—race through dead leaves and overgrown corn furrows, in the smells of pine and dirt and sun.

  Later, of course, the woods took on other meanings; they offered romantic shelter and privacy for kissing, touching—whatever forms early love took. Although actually (or so Claire thought) there was always something inherently sexual in that landscape: the lushness of it all, the white overflowing waterfalls and dense green caves of honeysuckle vines—and, in the fall, crimson leaves as bright as blood. The hiding and kissing, those heats and fears of love all came early for Claire, but for many years, all the years of her true childhood, she was busy with dams and Indian huts, with swinging out into the sky, wading and trying not to fall into the creek.

  One afternoon, when she must have been five or six, a small dark skinny child, Claire did fall into the creek; she fell right off a log on which she and some other children had all been crossing to the other side—off, splash, into the water. Not hurt, she stood up, soaking wet, her pink dress streaked with brown. The other children, all older than Claire, began to point and laugh at her, and she laughed, too, enjoying all the attention and the drama. “Oh, my mother will kill me!” sh
e cried out as the other kids went on laughing. And then one by one, accidentally on purpose, they all fell in, and stood around in their soaking wet clothes, in the hot, hot sun. It was a wonderful day, until it was time to go home, and then Claire began to get scared. Of course no one would kill her, but they would be very mad. Her mother, Isabel, would look at her and yell, because Claire was so careless, and her father, Bayard, might do almost anything, depending on how drunk he was; he might even yell at her mother for yelling at Claire, and hug Claire, but in a way that hurt. The only safe grown-up person was Lobelia, the maid, but there was no way to make sure of seeing Lobelia first, and Claire approached her parents’ large stone hilltop house cold and heavy with fear.

  There were five or six cars in the driveway, and then she remembered that they were having a party; good, she could go right into the kitchen, to Lobelia, and with luck they might forget all about her; she could sneak some food up the back stairs to her room, some ham and beaten biscuits, whatever.

  But there right in the middle of the kitchen, of all places for her to be, was Claire’s mother, with her head of wild red hair that everyone talked about (saying, “Too bad Claire didn’t get your hair, Isabel honey”). She was laughing and telling Lobelia something that some new guests had said about her beaten biscuits, so that Lobelia was smiling, very happy. And Isabel had never looked so beautiful, blue eyes and white teeth flashing, wearing a yellow dress, something floating.

  Claire’s father, Bayard, must have thought she was beautiful, too; coming into the kitchen at just that moment, he stared at Isabel, and then a great smile broke across his red, usually melancholy face, and he went over and kissed her on the neck—a thing that Claire had never seen him do before.

  Isabel must also have been surprised. “Well really, Bayard,” she said, in her irrevocably Bostonian voice, frowning a little but very pleased.